Workers Are Lazy Ingrates, Say Evil Bosses by Erik Sass

This week brings more data fueling the unending, unedifying struggle between office drones and bosses, with surveys suggesting about one third of the average office workday is devoted to surfing the Web -- with a good chunk of that going to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But as always, I have to wonder whether all this "wasted time" actually has a negative impact on productivity? ...Read the whole story

Improving Customer Loyalty Tops Social Media Budgets by Jack Loechner

According to national survey results jointly released by COLLOQUY and the Direct Marketing Association, U.S. companies that use social media primarily to deepen customer loyalty spend almost twice as much on this emerging channel as competitors who use it for brand awareness, customer acquisition and other core marketing purposes. Specifically, the survey results show the average social media spend for marketers whose primary objective is to obtain customer loyalty was $88,000 last year, compared to $53,000 for brand awareness and $30,000 for customer acquisition, the objectives that attracted the next highest spending levels. ...More

  • Twitter's New Redesign: Finally, A Service For The Rest Of Us by Catharine P. Taylor

    There's one thing I always try hard not to do when one of social media's big players comes out with substantial changes -- and that's to read what everyone else thinks about it before I form my own opinion. (Reading news stories is OK; reading everything about it on TechCrunch -- not OK.) Making sure to go wide-eyed and innocent into Twitter's redesign Tuesday was fairly easy. That said, I do have one big thought: that, as of this redesign -- which allows people to see more information about each tweet without leaving the service -- Twitter is finally a ...More